Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  “And you, Comrade Siezin? You’ll be stuck aboard this boat. Out of communication. Suppose someone takes advantage of that?” I didn’t for a moment suppose that there was all that much love and loyalty between the individual members of Greenfly. If Comrade Siezin had ideas of himself assuming the Soviet leadership then he might be confounded by one of his own mates, beaten in the race by a comrade on the spot in Moscow. “But I suppose you’ll have thought of that, won’t you?”

  There was an indifferent shrug. “It will not happen. And I shall not be out of communication as you suggest.”

  “You’ll surface afterwards?”

  “Perhaps. I do not yet know. The situation must itself dictate, Commander Shaw. But I can of course communicate in any event and I shall be in a position to take radio reports from my bureau in Moscow even when submerged.” Siezin went on to explain that the missile submarines, though forbidden ever to transmit whilst on patrol, could receive signals even when submerged at great depths and the same applied, he said, to this submarine. This was achieved by means of a wire streamed on the surface and capable of receiving VHF transmissions. It was by means of this wire, Siezin said, that in a war situation the firing orders would be expected to reach the missile submarines from the capital concerned – Moscow, London, Washington as the case might be. As it happened I was well aware of this but had let Siezin go on in case he revealed something useful.

  But he didn’t. He yacked politics and world domination while he ate. After a while I asked him what he intended doing with me and Felicity. That was a mistake; I’d meant to ask him where we fitted into his missile-launching scheme now that Comrade Smith was present but he took my question the wrong way. He said, “Afterwards you will be superfluous to our requirements. I think I need not elaborate.”

  I took a quick look at Felicity, wishing I’d not opened my mouth. She was as white as a sheet. But it should have been obvious, of course.

  I could find nothing whatever that either of us could do about anything. We were helpless. Just the two of us against a submarine’s dedicated complement plus Siezin’s personal bodyguard, moving south towards destiny beneath the Baltic waves. I even felt past prayer; if God intended doing anything he would already have made his mind up. Felicity and I … we were already superfluous. Or so I thought. That turned out to be wrong: Siezin and Kholov, when they’d finished eating, went into conference. There was a lot of quiet discussion out of my earshot, many nods and gestures, and then Siezin announced that there was to be a preliminary run through, a kind of dress rehearsal.

  *

  I was put under the drug again. So was Comrade Smith; I was roped down on a mattress placed across the deck of the control-room. The screen had been rigged along one of the bulkheads. We were festooned with electrodes. The periscope was down in its housing now: the submarine had gone deep but was maintaining its speed, so far as I knew until the drug had taken effect and though fully conscious had lost awareness of such mundane details. It was back to the mental processes, the projection on the screen. My own thoughts showed as a jumble: ship names, one after the other, the names of the missile fleet. Black hulls making their way down the Firth of Clyde past the Cumbraes, past the Sound of Bute, past Arran … I couldn’t keep my thoughts free of what was upmost in my mind, although I tried to force them onto something more innocuous. My efforts did have the effect of a blur, but in any case neither Kholov or Siezin appeared much interested in my submarine reflections. I heard, as through a daze, the voice of Dr Kholov urging politics and Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence on me. As a result, some images came through; but they were flickering, insubstantial. Crowds outside Number Ten, yelling for the Prime Minister’s blood because war loomed. Peace marchers doing much the same outside the House of Commons. And back into history: a pugnacious man in a funny black hat that was a mix of topper and bowler, holding up two fingers in a rude gesture. That sort of thing. It didn’t appear to be of much use and Kholov hissed angrily. I was disconnected from the screen. Comrade Smith came on in my place. I hadn’t been put under so deeply as last time, back inside Russia itself, and I was able to watch the reflected thoughts of our British defector.

  As with me, it was the Firth of Clyde to begin with: a nuclear-powered submarine, out of Faslane presumably, moving along fast beneath a clear blue sky. The sea was calm and there was snow on the heights of Arran above Lamlash. Ahead, also snow-covered, was the great rock of Ailsa Craig. There was no ship name on the hull but every now and again a word appeared as Comrade Smith thought on: Iron Duke. So it was to be HMS Iron Duke, one of our latest class. Like Revenge and Resolution the previous vessel of that name had been a battleship. Long before my time but I knew of them. Emperor of India, Benbow, Marlborough, Iron Duke. Iron Duke had been the flagship of the Grand Fleet in World War One, had ended her career as an accommodation ship off Lyness in Scapa, filled with concrete as a result of some of Hitler’s bombs in World War Two, fixed to the sea bed – the tide used to rise round her. Powerful in her day, but a fleabite as compared with her current namesake.

  Comrade Smith threw the current Iron Duke’s control-room onto the screen. I saw men moving about, tending things, reading dials. Then the control room vanished and up came another scene: Comrade Smith’s thoughts produced the words Missile Control Centre. I saw an officer, a lieutenant-commander, holding a pistol-grip trigger. The missile firer? Then there was another shift: the new one looked like the wardroom, a group of rather formless-faced officers in white, open-neck shirts with shoulder-straps, playing cards. Mostly smoking cigarettes. One of them wore the scarlet cloth of the medical branch between his gold stripes, a surgeon lieutenant. I assumed these to be the officers with whom Comrade Smith had sailed when he’d taken his submerged trip. All this was merely historic: even the name didn’t really have to be that of the target submarine. More of the content of Comrade Smith’s mind was thrown onto the screen: a jumble of things largely, but they gradually sorted out again and the context told me we were still with HMS Iron Duke.

  Kholov was growing impatient: he had a word with Siezin, who nodded and frowned. Some of Kholov’s explanations to me back in his laboratory or whatever came vividly to me through the haze produced by the drug. He’d said I’d been able to mingle with the wavelength, with the thoughts and actions, the current thoughts and actions, of the people of whom I was thinking, that I was a vehicle for what was not quite extra-sensory perception. I was not required exactly to prophesy; I would not be programmed for that. An eavesdropping of the conscious mind – that was what Kholov had said. He’d quoted Socrates: in dreams the soul can apprehend what it does not know. But I had been, and was now, awake. My mind, according to Kholov, was able to apprehend, like the soul in dreams, what it did not know …

  “The element is precognosis,” I said aloud.

  Kholov swung round on me. I said, “You told me that, Dr Kholov.”

  He nodded. “Yes. And I answered, when you suggested that I meant telepathy, that it was indeed telepathy of a kind. I – ”

  “Induced telepathic ability.”

  “That is correct. And the precognosis element is of the present. Not the future. That is the nub.”

  “And Comrade Smith,” I said, “isn’t getting there. He’s missing the nub – isn’t he?”

  Smith was still being historic. He himself appeared in his screen-depicted thoughts and that, to me, was the proof that he wasn’t with the present. He couldn’t be in two places at once … I began to laugh. This thing wasn’t going to work out. It was obvious the test, the rehearsal, wasn’t going well. Kholov rounded on me, his temper showing, and brought the back of a hand across my face, twice. He didn’t like being laughed at. He said that, in any case, I would see that there was nothing to laugh about. Not for me. There was time in hand yet, he said.

  I thought about that wire streamed on the surface above the submerged submarine. Would Comrade Siezin send his orders by radio, the firing orders as from Whitehall, for reception
via the VHF wire streamed from the Iron Duke?

  Unlikely, very. The form of the firing order really would be secret: no agent would have a hope of ever getting inside knowledge of that. Besides, any interference signal of that sort would be picked up in Whitehall and in the headquarters of C-in-C Fleet at North wood, and an immediate cancellation would be issued in the midst of the sheer panic that would grip the government, and in the general confusion the captain of the Iron Duke would naturally play safe.

  Wouldn’t he? In point of fact it would be quite a decision to have to make. Which side would he consider authentic? He might well decide that the moment had come to disregard the absolute order that said he must never transmit whilst on patrol: he might ask for clarification. After that it would again depend on his own assessment, his interpretation of the answers that he would get from Whitehall and from Comrade Siezin. But there was still the question of Siezin getting the form right – that was still highly unlikely. Very big, very lethal rats would be smelled aboard the Iron Duke. However, that streamed wire remained on my mind. It didn’t show on the screen since I was disconnected; Comrade Smith was still in the hot seat. Kholov was now squatting by his side on the deck, talking quietly into his ear, and another injection had been given. And there was a vital difference now. We were still with the Iron Duke but we were not in the wardroom and there was no sign of Smith in the picture. It was all much more immediate, somehow. And there were different, sharper faces among the officers – there was a different captain for one.

  I felt my flesh creep, almost literally. I had a feeling Kholov and Siezin really were getting somewhere. I had a feeling that via Comrade Smith’s drug-induced coma or whatever it was, we were seeing inside the Iron Duke on her current patrol. A strong degree of triumph seemed to be sparking between Kholov and Siezin. In the screen-depicted Missile Control Centre I saw the combination-lock safe containing the pistol-grip that would start the last war of all. My understanding was that two officers, the captain and one other, were required to bring together, from different safes with different combinations, authentication cards to check the war signal from C-in-C Fleet – a fact that should finally dispose of any interference possibility. Should dispose … but Kholov and Siezin were growing more confident by the minute.

  Then, via Smith, I saw on the screen the navigation chart of the Iron Duke. I saw her current position marked. So did Comrade Siezin. He turned round and said, “She is in the North Sea. Off the Firth of Forth, between there and the Skagerrak.”

  Which was considerably nearer to our own position than I’d been bargaining for.

  15

  I said, “There’ll come a time when she’ll pick us up, Comrade Siezin. Her sonar – ”

  “Her captain will not be alarmed or surprised. Such will have happened before. From time to time the patrol areas cross as between the Soviet and the British and American missile submarines.”

  If only we hit her, I thought. Many lives might be lost, mine and Felicity’s included, but world tragedy would be avoided. I didn’t know how close Comrade Siezin needed to be, but I thought it wouldn’t need to be all that close considering that Smith had brought it all up so clearly already, and probably Siezin could give a go at any moment. I asked him: at this stage he wouldn’t see any reason to hold back.

  He said, “We must wait for an exercise, Commander Shaw.”

  “An exercise?”

  “Each patrolling submarine exercises a missile launch at intervals of a few days at most. An exercise signal comes from North wood and all short of the actual launch is enacted just as though it was real.”

  “You know it all, don’t you,” I said bitterly.

  “I think so, yes,” Siezin answered with full confidence. “And, you see, when the exercise is at its height – when the signal, the real and true signal for exercise has been made and received, and the authentication has been given by the responsible officers, and the pistol-grip has been produced from the final safe – ”

  “All of which you’ll learn from Smith?”

  Siezin nodded. “Yes. Everything will have been prepared for us. With the pistol ready to be squeezed … that is when we make our interference. That is when, from this submarine, we send off the missiles.”

  I asked, “How do you put them on course? How do you direct them where you want, rather than wherever they might be targeted for?”

  Siezin smiled. “Always they are targeted on Russia! That is what they are for, is it not?”

  “But the remote areas, the northern shores where there aren’t many people? They won’t be targeted up that way, will they?”

  Siezin smiled again and met the eye of Dr Kholov. “They can be re-directed in flight,” he said. There was some curious undertone in his voice; and I didn’t believe him. I believed he didn’t care whereabouts in Russia the missiles landed, I believed that so long as he had his way and put Greenfly on top, he didn’t care how many of his countrymen died. And I believed that, rather naturally, he didn’t want the men aboard the submarine to know this. They wouldn’t want their families, scattered over many parts of Russia presumably, to suffer. They might mutiny. It was just possible in any case that none of them except maybe the captain knew what Siezin was doing. They could have been hoodwinked – that wouldn’t have been difficult. Russians do what they’re told in the main. All the conversation between Smith and me, and between the Russians and me, had been in English and the ratings in the proximity hadn’t shown the least sign of understanding. I began to feel the onset of something not far removed from panic: this whole set-up, basically so weird, so way out, so impossible, was taking on the aspect of reality, of something that could happen – was going to happen. The British, next time the exercise signal went out from C-in-C Fleet for a dummy run, would play straight into Siezin’s hands, preparing the way for him.

  It was all so simple, if you accepted those extra-sensory powers given to Comrade Smith. I both did and didn’t: it went way beyond my experience and my belief but I had myself been put under that drug, back in Russia – much more deeply under than this time aboard the submarine – and I remembered the sensation, the rocking of my mind, of my whole mental balance, as though, before I’d gone under and out, I was being drawn away from the reality of time and place, that my mind had left my body and had settled, hovering, somewhere … where Senyavin, now dead, had wanted it to be, where Dr Kholov, here present and very much alive, had wanted it to be.

  I looked around at the maze of instruments, the computers, the electric circuits, the dials, the flickering green lights, the taped leads connecting Comrade Smith’s mind and brain to the screen. A bull in a china shop was what was wanted. I wouldn’t have a chance, of course, of playing that role. Nor would Felicity. She was now handcuffed to a ringbolt set into a bulkhead, well away from all the vital parts; and I was tied down to my mattress still. I didn’t know even now what part I was expected to play but assumed there must be something lined up. I looked at the screen, at the enlarged end-product of Comrade Smith’s deeply drugged mind.

  It still showed normality as yet, the routine of a long patrol.

  It hopped about a little: ratings at the various controls, the planesmen watching their dial readings, hands lightly on the aircraft-type wheels that kept the boat trimmed to the orders of the officer of the watch behind them. Then the wardroom, with the off-watch officers reading, yawning. The bunks set throughout the boat, some with men asleep. The galley, the wireless room, the surgery, the main machinery space, the messdeck set with tables. Then, again, the Missile Control Centre, all very quiet and peaceful. Yet, to me, brooding, the calm before the storm. It could be a long calm. It would depend on when the last exercise firing had been signalled. Siezin had spoken of an exercise every few days. Not that it mattered. Armageddon would come sooner or later. I was convinced of that now. There would be no avoidance; when we surfaced again it would be to a shattered world. We might even remain submerged until the fall-out had cleared away. We would hav
e the capacity to do just that. But it would be up to Comrade Siezin, of course; he might want to be in Moscow, asserting the fact of Greenfly’s takeover from the old guard.

  *

  A man entered the control-room and I looked up at him and saw import as he approached the captain. A lot of time had passed now and I had been told we had entered the Skagerrak some while earlier and were moving out fast into the North Sea, approaching the position as estimated of the Iron Duke on her patrol. There was a brief conversation between the captain and the newcomer and a sheet of paper was handed over. The captain caught Comrade Siezin’s eye and passed the paper to him. I saw the sudden consternation in Siezin’s face. He and Kholov went into a huddle with the captain. I couldn’t catch anything that was being said but it seemed there could be a spanner in the works. After a few moments Siezin came away from the group and approached me. It seemed my services were required. I was untied from the mattress and, with a gun in my back, I was led out of the control-room and taken to the wireless office.

  Questions. I refused to answer them and the rough stuff started. After five minutes I was pretty groggy: I had been hit repeatedly, with fists and gun-barrels, all over my body. Comrade Siezin was a right bastard and he was angry. And worried: there had been a signal, that piece of paper. It had come in from one of Siezin’s lot – a naval Greenfly supporter infiltrated into the Russian naval base at Murmansk. A transmission from London had been picked up by the Russian monitors. There had been a number of corrupt groups – it was a cyphered message, but the Russians had the means of breaking cyphers and they’d broken this one. The corrupt groups were so many that in fact they hadn’t got much out of it, but what they had got Siezin’s plant had passed on. And what brought me into it was 6D2. It had been a 6D2 cypher.

  And, of course, Comrade Siezin had spent his WUS-WIPP years fighting us in 6D2. He wanted to know what the signal meant.